Our Focus on Integrations Continues

Today is another step forward for our growing Nimble Apps Marketplace. We welcome three new technology partners—Zapier, FreshDesk, and Import2. These integrations further empower our customers to engage across multiple social networks from their Nimble account.

Our team is acting on its promise to help our developer community make Nimble ever more efficient and productive, so professionals and collaborative teams can accomplish their tasks from one central social relationship management platform. With these integrations, Nimble customers can chose to connect with the exact features that matter to them and their own customers.

Today’s New Integrations

Use Zapier to integrate Nimble into your favorite business applications. Connecting web-based apps has always been a challenge. Either users did it manually themselves or hired a programmer to sync apps with complicated APIs. Zapier helps business people, who know their time is better spent connecting with customers, by syncing the web services they are already using on a daily basis to increase productivity and results. Think of Zapier as an If This, Then That (IFTTT) for business users.

With Zapier connected to Nimble you can automatically:

Send new Salesforce.com leads into Nimble for more effective social selling.

Send new QuickBooks customers and vendors into Nimble to nurture and manage relationships.

Send new GoToWebinar attendees into Nimble for more effective customer engagement.

Just drag and drop the icons for Nimble and your favorite web app into place, select the information to transfer and Zapier does the rest. Follow Zapier on Twitter.

The Nimble-Freshdesk integration enables agents to see full customer records from within a Freshdesk help ticket. Freshdesk is a cloud-based help desk software system that allows organizations to support their customers through email, phone, website, Facebook and Twitter. Its simple yet powerful features make Freshdesk a great solution for startups to enterprises. Freshdesk and Nimble work together to create a “social help desk” that keeps business owners and small teams organized with the most up-to-date, accurate information available about their customers.

With Freshdesk connected to Nimble you can easily:

View Nimble contact details from the Freshdesk support ticket

Import new contacts into Nimble from Freshdesk

Review Freshdesk customer email and social conversation history in Nimble

Import2

Import2 for Nimble is a complete data import solution for Nimble. It helps customers import all accounts, contacts and sales activity history into Nimble from other CRMs, such as Salesforce.com, Zoho, SugarCRM, SalesLogix, Highrise and many others. It’s as easy as clicking one button. Import2 believes that users should be able to control the data they store in cloud apps they use, making moving data in and out of apps simple. Importing data quickly, accurately and with confidence continues to be one of the most sought-after items on productivity wish lists. Follow import2 on their website and on Twitter.

Easily migrate new sales reps to Nimble from a variety of contact products

Onward and Upward

We are committed to giving your business even more ways to close the marketing and sales loop. Our Apps Marketplace already hosts a collection of social business tools and applications that extend the power of Nimble by offering lead capture and analytics, email marketing support, and more. Current Apps Marketplace partners include HubSpot, HootSuite, MailChimp, Wufoo and Rapportive.

Nimble is always on the look out for cool applications that will add value to our community. If you are a developer with an interest in building into the Nimble social business platform, please check out the Nimble Developer Portal and contact us with any questions.

Please let us know what you think of these additions to the Marketplace. As always, your guidance and support inspire us as we move Nimble forward.

“Nimble is like my morning newspaper now… it allows me to scroll through and se what’s going on, what conversations are happening out there, what topics pop up. It allows me to have greater reach than I’ve had in the past”

If you run a small business, you may have accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks. If you haven’t, you’ve probably been told many times that you should have.

Why? I bet you’ve been told that, with millions of people in these networks, it’s a good place to market your business. It is, but maybe not in the way you’ve been led to expect.

When these social networks started, people joined to network socially. Then people who spotted the opportunity joined just to market their businesses, but nobody—NOBODY—has ever joined a social network to be sold to.

What this means is that there are thousands of small business owners on Twitter lurking anonymously behind their logo and business name and struggling to get results—because why would anyone follow a business account when nobody wants to be sold to?

There are people auto-posting their own blog links in multiple LinkedIn Groups under the disguise of discussions and displaying desperation by “liking” their own submissions—with the result that members are flagging them as inappropriate because nobody wants to be sold to.

The Unsightly Landscape of Dashed Hopes

Facebook is littered with unloved and unseen business pages as (even if they’ve liked them out of politeness) the posts are invisible because nobody wants to be sold to.

The problem is that everyone is using the term “social media marketing” without fully understanding what it means. Social media marketing is an art and a science used to great effect by big brands and specialist agencies that use complex tools and algorithms to decide where to place adverts and do their marketing on social networks. It is not something that small businesses can dip into on their own.

Just Be Social

This begs the question: If you run a small business; can you use social networks for marketing? The answer is an emphatic “Yes,” but you need to adopt different strategies. Instead of social media marketing, concentrate on becoming an expert social networker. I’m guessing that as a small business owner you are already pretty good at face-to-face networking so you already know the basics.

The Tragic Faux Pas of Social Networking

You wouldn’t turn up at a networking meeting with a bag on your head with a business card stuck to it, so don’t do that in social networks.

You wouldn’t burst into a room and blurt out a sales pitch—or worse, send a recording of your sales pitch—to be broadcast at scheduled intervals at several meetings at once. Don’t do that in social networks.

You wouldn’t ignore people in the room who spoke to you until you found time to reply to them a couple of days later, so don’t do that in social networks.

What You Should Do

Imagine visiting a prospect in their office. You’d see what books they read, pictures of their family, certificates they have on their wall. Imagine taking them out for lunch. You’d get to know their likes and dislikes and maybe their hopes, dreams, disappointments and achievements. Connecting with them in social networks can be just as revealing if you take time to get to know people and make them the most important part of the conversation. As Dale Carnegie said in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People: “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

Grab Your Tools and Get Networking!

Speaking as someone whose business has tripled since I started using social networking, there are some excellent tools that make it easy for us to hear what are our prospects are talking about, know when we’re being talked about, make it easy to respond and generally allow us to do everything online that we can do in a room full of people. My advice is to forget social media marketing and use the tools that make it easy to be great at social networking. Talk about the things that let people get to know you as a person and when they get to know you and like you, then they’ll be interested in what you do.

“Using social media as a customer relationship channel is no longer a luxury, it’s a must-do. I knew Nimble would really help us in this regard – we’d finally be able to grow, nurture and track our social communities through our CRM.”